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Lot Essay

The images in this album predates Freud and the Surrealists' preoccupation with aggression and eroticism by almost half a century.
The album was created by an anonymous French amateur photographer, and consisted of about 100 pages containing 200 photocollages, salt prints and hand-colored photographs. Its date of 1870 is tied to a newspaper clipping from that year which appears in another of the collages.
The remainder of this extraordinary album is now in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.